Tom Stoppard quotes - page 4

When Harold Pinter was lobbying to have London's Comedy Theatre renamed the Pinter Theatre, Stoppard wrote back: "Have you thought, instead, of changing your name to Harold Comedy?" (Tom Stoppard)
Wake me up for breakfast, if I'm not dead. View quote
Tom Stoppard
Obviously, you would give your life for your children, or give them the last biscuit on the plate. But to me, the trick in life is to take that sense of generosity between kin, make it apply to the extended family and to your neighbour, your village and beyond. View quote
Tom Stoppard
An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality. The temples are built and brought down around him, continuously and contiguously, from Troy to the fields of Flanders. If there is any meaning in any of it, it is in what survives as art, yes even in the celebration of tyrants, yes even in the celebration of nonentities. What now of the Trojan War if it had been passed over by the artist's touch? Dust. A forgotten expedition prompted by Greek merchants looking for new markets. A minor redistribution of broken pots. But it is we who stand enriched, by a tale of heroes, of a golden apple, a wooden horse, a face that launched a thousand ships - and above all, of Ulysses, the wanderer, the most human, the most complete of all heroes - husband, father, son, lover, farmer, soldier, pacifist, politician, inventor and adventurer. View quote
Tom Stoppard
If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice. View quote
Tom Stoppard
The days of the digital watch are numbered. View quote
Tom Stoppard
The truth is always a compound of two half-truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say. View quote
Tom Stoppard
... reality, the name we give to the common experience. View quote
Tom Stoppard
When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore. View quote
Tom Stoppard
The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. View quote
Tom Stoppard
It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. (Tom Stoppard)
Give us this day our daily mask. View quote
Tom Stoppard
I shall have poetry in my life. And adventure. And love, love, love, above all. Love as there has never been in a play. Unbiddable, ungovernable, like a riot in the heart and nothing to be done, come ruin or rapture. View quote
Tom Stoppard
I love love. I love having a lover and being one. The insularity of passion. I love it. I love the way it blurs the distinction between everyone who isn't one's lover. View quote
Tom Stoppard
Rosencrantz: I don't believe in it anyway. Guildenstern: What? Rosencrantz: England. Guildenstern: Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then? View quote
Tom Stoppard
An artist is the magician put among men to gratify - capriciously - their urge for immortality. View quote
Tom Stoppard
I mean, if Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at twenty-two, the history of music would have been very different. As would the history of aviation, of course. View quote
Tom Stoppard
I am not my body. My body is nothing without me. View quote
Tom Stoppard
A man speaking sense to himself is no madder than a man speaking nonsense not to himself. View quote
Tom Stoppard
Uncertainty is the normal state. View quote
Tom Stoppard
He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps. (Tom Stoppard)
Septimus. When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore. Thomasina. Then we will dance. Is this a waltz? View quote
Tom Stoppard
War is capitalism with the gloves off and many who go to war know it but they go to war because they don't want to be a hero. It takes courage to sit down and be counted. View quote
Tom Stoppard
I began my talk by saying that I had not written my plays for purposes of discussion. At once, I felt a ripple of panic run through the hall. I suddenly realised why. To everyone present, discussion was the whole point of drama. That was why the faculty had been endowed - that was why all those buildings had been put up! I had undermined the entire reason for their existence. View quote
Tom Stoppard
I had no idea Gwendolen knew any foreign languages, and I am not sure that I approve. It's the sort of thing that can only broaden a girl's mind. View quote
Tom Stoppard